


circles

by kajitsukai



Category: Exalted
Genre: Other, POV Third Person Limited
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-17
Updated: 2016-05-17
Packaged: 2018-06-09 00:37:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6882283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kajitsukai/pseuds/kajitsukai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A story is told in a cycle, from beginning to end to beginning. A circle is much the same.</p>
<p>Sarnai Narangerel's thoughts on her circlemates.</p>
            </blockquote>





	circles

I. _night_

She’d seen once, on their long journey south, a flower made of iron and glass, twisted and spun into delicate petals but still sharp as any blade. It had been a pretty thing, meant to be some rich merchant’s centerpiece, but a flower made of so much steel didn’t seem to her like it was meant for a peaceful dinner.

Looking at Lien, she remembers that flower, and wonders. He cannot be the quiet, still water he acts--no one truly so demure and delicate would talk so easily about finding what people want, and using it as a weapon. No one so fragile would stand as an equal inside that closed room, still as the grave and nearly as silent.

( _“What did you want, that you weren’t supposed to?”_

_“Not me, but my father...that is why he’s dead.”_ )

The riverfolk had any number of phrases about still waters, and it’s not as though her village had not. Even the traders that came through sometimes remarked that a still pool was almost always deeper than it appeared. But in this case, she doesn’t think the water is still.

She doesn’t think that flower’s made of silk or honey. 

II. _eclipse_

In retrospect, it isn’t really a surprise to Sarnai, that she’s come to watch Ram so closely. Everything about him, from the way he dresses to the way he talks to even the way he gestures seems carefully tailored to get as many eyes on him as possible. 

She doesn’t understand how he says so much and reveals so little. It’s startling to her, how little she understands about how Ram thinks or how he’s feeling--she knows what he chooses to tell her is true, but it comes in pieces slid in too fast for her to question, or in small things she doesn’t know how to piece in with the rest of him. 

Sarnai doesn’t think that she can solve a man like him, that she can figure out before he wants her or anyone else to figure out how the man who dotes freely on children and grandmothers is the same man who coldly challenges Jayendra, sharp-edged and sharper-tongued. That man is the same man who teases her right up until she wants to hit him, and then calms her back down with the right words and a smirk of a man who knows _exactly_ what he’s doing.

(She asks him directly, once, how and why he kept messing with her if he wanted things kept close to the chest--she’s not subtle, and she isn’t going to lie if confronted about it. It’s not as though she could lie her way out of a burlap sack, anyway, she’d pointed out. He’d only laughed and tweaked her nose, and told her it was more fun that way.)

He arrests her attention, and it frustrates her, but it isn’t particularly _surprising_. There is far more to worry about in this vast and strange new part of creation than one pirate captain with a terrible moral compass and dazzling grin, and Sarnai isn’t vain enough to think she might mesmerize him into opening up, like some heroine in the cheap stories in Great Forks, or any of the other tales told along the rivers they’d come south with. She refuses to entertain the idea he’d stay in Nilamkeere for her or anyone else, when all this is said and done--they’re adults, not mooning children. She has things she has to do, and he’ll find his.

In the meanwhile, all she can do is watch, and listen. 

III. _twilight_

Sarnai has spent her entire life never seeing another person who looks remotely like her. Her skin had stood out as much as her wings, in the north--although the former was more common, it still marked her as out of place. 

Shakuntala is the closest she’s ever seen to someone like her, and that makes the differences harsher, starker. The brightly-colored feathers in Shakuntala’s hair gleam like fire, bright as jewels, and the tail that fans from under her skirt are just as brilliant. She is beautiful, serene and wise, with an even hand and mind sharper than any blade Sarnai could hope to wield. 

But that is not the first thing Sarnai notices about the sorceress.

If Ram and Jayendra shine and dazzle, Shakuntala _burns_. Her anger isn’t hidden, isn’t subtle, a smoldering core in her heart. It is a wonder to Sarnai, sometimes, that someone so angry has such a gentle touch, and she wonders what lodged in Shakuntala’s heart so deep that it burns harshly enough even she can see it.

Sarnai does not ask. It would be a poor repayment of kindness to do so. If the story wants to be told, it will be--Sarnai has no place nor no right to demand it. 

IV. _zenith_

Jayendra is a man she isn’t sure what to make of, not entirely. Maybe it’s her own sense of unease around others, or maybe it’s the strangeness that has brought her to Nilamkeere, but his enthusiasm seems near madness to her, not to mention how downright _friendly_ he is. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it is strange and foreign and leaves her dizzy. Perhaps even mildly alarmed.

And yet, it works. It keeps working, over and over. His affable nature, his mercy, his tenderness shines like a beacon, and when his mood shifts so does the kingdom around him. She doesn’t know what to think of the comparisons made between them (she knows it’s likely an insult from several people. It’s _definitely_ not flattering when it comes from Ram), and she doesn’t know what to think of the way the world bends. Her idealism comes hard-won, at the edge of a sword and wounds she can no longer afford to show.

Jayendra wears his pain and his moods on his sleeve, and the whole world turns to listen, to laugh with him, to weep with him. She’d be jealous, if she could think of anything to do with such a gift. But Sarnai’s lands and ways are cold and simple, not lonely but quiet, and the bright southern sunlight Jayendra was born into is not for her.

She’s not sure that crown could sit on anyone else, either.

V. _dawn_

Sarnai has wondered many times, how the story about her might be told. She makes the mistake of asking, sidelong, how people describe her to others, and gets a variety of answers, ranging from accidentally insulting (the number of times her plumage has been mistaken for a falcons’ is 26. She’s debating punching someone when it hits thirty), to adorable and admiring, to downright filthy. Although, in retrospect, she should have known better than to ask anyone while they were two bottles and an entire snuffbox into some seriously special times.

She hears the exultations most of all, and they make her feathers stand on end. Already, the story they tell of her swells too large. What do they see, when they look at her? Why is it different, than what she sees in the mirror? Sarnai touches her fingers to the glass of one in the palace, and stifles a sigh. She knows what men like Crow Li think, suspects most of the politicians think and see the same thing. A foreign barbarian, a naive brute, idealistic and violent, heavy-handed, _in over her head._ If they think her stupid, she supposes they may not be wrong, but if they think her blind or deaf…

The others who sit in Jayendra’s’ war room are harder to tease out. Shakuntala’s stated opinions are honest, as are Jayendra’s himself--they consider her a friend, or at least an ally. Lien does not speak often, or loudly--he fades away so fast from the lessons Sarnai begins to think he is afraid of her. As for Ram, she’s never quite sure if he’s underestimated her, or overestimated, and quite frankly she’s a little afraid to ask.

But what of her? Sarnai smiles faintly at the glass, noting where the expression stretches the scars on her face. The one on her lip was old, a remark on childhood recklessness. The one across her nose is six months fresh, a reminder of adult folly. She stares deep into eyes a color she’d seen nowhere else until they reached the sea--a green no grass or plant ever bore, but one that dances along the waves of the water. Sarnai sees the story of her life etched across her face, and fingers the scar, before the smile turns into a smirk.

If no one else sees what she does, then that’s a story she’ll have to spin out herself.

**Author's Note:**

> This is @laskaris' faullllttttt


End file.
